Psychological Capital And Academic Achievement Among Secondary School Students: A Correlational Study

This study examined psychological capital and academic achievement among Grade 10 students in government secondary schools in Tehsil Sahiwal, District Sargodha, Pakistan. A quantitative survey approach was used to describe students’ psychological capital and examine its relationship with academic achievement. The study focused on four psychological-capital dimensions: self-efficacy, confidence, hope, resilience, and optimism. A researcher-developed 17-item questionnaire was reviewed by experts and pilot tested with 70 students; the reported Cronbach’s alpha was .742. Students’ academic achievement was intended to be represented by annual examination marks from school records, while the questionnaire also contained four self-reported academic-achievement items. The correlation matrix contains an apparent perfect correlation between optimism and the questionnaire’s academic-achievement score (r = 1.000, p < .001), whereas the reported association between recorded marks and the academic-achievement score was small and nonsignificant (r = −.078, p = .161).